


Worth It

by drea_rev



Category: Check Please! (Webcomic)
Genre: Black Lives Matter, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Mental Health Issues, Rare Pairings, samwell protest
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-02-22
Updated: 2017-02-22
Packaged: 2018-09-26 07:05:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 1,835
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9872753
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/drea_rev/pseuds/drea_rev
Summary: Nursey is overwhelmed by the struggles black Americans face. Hockey slides to the back burner while poetry can't help him cope for once. He reaches out to fellow frog Chowder, and gets pushback from Dex as to whether a small town protest will "do anything but waste time".This will be a slow burn romance fic and also a platonic friend-love fic with real world issues. That being the case, big tw for racism and resulting mental health difficultiesUPDATE: I started a bittynursey ship tumblr @ https://nurseyxbitty.tumblr.com/





	1. Lake

The glowing digits two feet away read 2:54 AM. Even when Derek blinked, they glowed in the dark behind his eyes.

The rest of the room was a submerged blue-black, and Derek knew he could cover the alarm clock with a hat, or a bandanna, and make the room completely dark, and therefore more conducive to getting REM sleep. He also knew that there wasn’t any point.

The last five nights, he’d woken up choking. Nightmares swirled in and out of his mind; where before he’d looked for inspiration in his dreams, looking forward to them, now he dreaded later hours. They always seemed so real. Like they could really happen. Because they could.

And he had no way of talking himself out of that.

Phone calls with his parents, even tearful ones, had happened in the locker room recently, and the weight on him of lifting them up, making them feel less scared, had made him, at times, forget that he was tying his skates, where before he’d had a routine he could do in his sleep.

2:56.

Derek reached out of the covers and grabbed his phone.

Chris answered on the third ring. He would. “Nursey?? What’s the matter?”

“I...I just...I can’t sleep, C, you want to...walk to the lake?”

A heartbeat passed before Chris answered, “I’ll pick you up at your dorm. Wait for me.”

 

 

The grayish cloudy night with a ghost of a moon made the quads and pathways look like they were from another dimension. Chris met Derek, his dark eyes not puzzled, but concerned, and threw an arm around his shoulders, almost protectively, as they began their walk. They went slow. A rabbit dashed out of a bush and across the path, and Derek almost laughed: it reminded him of the small differences between big and little towns.

But too soon, almost, they were at the lake, and its flat expanse, sans ice, made him think of how it was, yet wasn’t a rink. His obligations came to his mind, how he should have brought his notebook. Even though he had discussed these thoughts with his therapist, even when he was in the pits of dispair his obligations to be a better poet wouldn’t leave him alone. _I can’t right now, he tried to tell the thoughts. Poetry is the last thing on my mind right now._

_But it’s a coping mechanism. It used to be,_ another voice came back.

_But it isn’t now._

_So you just gave up?_

Derek made an involuntary movement with his shoulder. The thoughts just needed to leave him ALONE.

“You holding up good?” Chris said quietly, turning Derek to face him, searching his face with his eyes.

“Y-no. No.”

“Want to sit down?”

They found a bench, Chris using his phone’s light to help them, and sat, and Derek tried to remember diaphragmatic breathing exercises. _Like that’ll help when a cop jumps on you_ , said his mind.

“Chris. I—I just don’t know, man. What’s—what’s the point of hockey? What’s the point of poetry? They’re so small and—and so fucking—people just die, what was the point of all the small stuff they did? They die, and then it’s gone, and--”

Derek was shaking. He sounded like a kid. He was one.

He suddenly felt pressure, gentle soothing pressure, around him, and he realized Chris had wrapped him in hoodie-clad arms, and he nodded, leaning into the hug, resting his face on Chris’s shoulder. Then the tears came, the choking, sobbing involuntary stops and starts of breath. He felt Chris’s palm on the middle of his back, holding him in place, so he tried to relax his body so he could breathe enough through the sobs.

“Yeah, Nursey...yeah...”

“I hate being pessimistic but...I just can’t pretend everything’s fine, now, you know? I used to...”

“Yeah...”

“My parents are so scared...”

“Yeah...”

Derek wrapped his arms around Chris’s chest and held on for dear life. It seemed like hours, but then it didn’t, because Chris kept whispering that they had time.


	2. Smartphone

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Derek has a lot on his plate with a team member who thinks the only way to win is to not care. TW for discussion of real-life racism-related murders and police brutality, but some humor toward the end.

“...look, what would you do if a cop told you to do something?!” Dex said, jersey off, framed by the locker room slats, face pinched, nose wrinkled under the freckles. “You wouldn’t like--”

“What I would do?” Derek spat, “What I would fucking do if I was pinned to the ground being choked, you mean?”

“No. What you would do if—before it ever got to that--”

“Oh so there’s a before. There’s a before! There’s only a fucking before if you’re white, damnit, Dex! There wasn’t a fucking before for Tamir!”

“Who’s that?”

Derek was this close to ripping his hockey bag open. Actually, he was this close to ripping William J. Pointdexter open. But instead he was standing, fists clenched, in the middle of the Samwell locker room, while Dex went about his post-practice tasks like the conversation they were having meant nothing to him. Which, Derek realized, it didn’t.

That was what made it all the more infuriating.

“He’s a little boy—goddamnit, I’m not Google, fucking type it into your smartphone and do the work yourself! There is nothing you can do! There is nothing you can wear! There is nothing that you can be other than white that protects you! Shit! They take you into custody when you’re armed and dangerous, give you a chance in court!”

Derek knew he was losing it, by the look on Dex’s face, the look that was probably meant to make him feel primitive, caveman-like, just by being angry. He whipped around to his own locker and snatched up his hockey bag, but then he heard Dex’s voice behind him:

“So you think a fucking little protest is gonna do anything other than waste time?”

Derek turned around, ready to do it, to throw a good punch straight through Dex’s jaw, but he was pulled back in the wind-up, dragged toward the door from behind, and and knew who it was from the smell of Ransom’s Kenzo Homme cologne. “It’s not worth it,” whispered the other defenseman in his ear.

Then he saw Holster, wearing his ridiculous flannel-lined bathrobe, walk in front of him and block Dex from his view.

“What’s going on?” came Jack’s voice from behind Ransom. “Why are you back in here?”

“Jack, we’re handling it, go on back,” Holster said over his shoulder.

“What happened? What’s wrong with Derek?”

Derek turned and pulled away, slipped between Ransom and Jack, his hockey bag striking his hip somewhat painfully. He hated these sorts of situations, where he was the focus of an argument that had brought other people into it, and he hated that the only option was to walk out and let an idiot have the last word, and he hated when other people who hadn’t been involved ran after him as if wanting to calm him down like he was some sort of animal.

He hated that there was nothing he could do about it.

This time, it was Ransom, and he slapped an arm on Derek’s shoulder. Derek wanted to throw it off, but he stopped walking instead and turned. It struck him suddenly that he had left Faber. That he was halfway to his dorm.

“Man, look, nothing he says can take anything from you. He says that, that’s him, that’s everything to do with him,” Ransom murmured.

Derek’s face felt like a stone. “Then maybe he could shut up.”

“Well he could,” Ransom scratched where his cheekbone met his fresh-shaved hair with two fingertips. “He certainly could.”

“But he doesn’t.”

They stared at each other as the wind separated the leaves above them and made them ring against each other. Derek wondered how the world was still spinning around them, the only two still objects in a field of movement.

 

 

“I don’t get it, what were they fighting about?” Jack said, almost to himself, walking out of the locker room. That was Eric’s cue.

After a peek around the corner for good measure, he ran out of the shower, shivering, and opened his bag. The brand-new Keroppi briefs beckoned to him, comfortable and cute.

And no way would he have changed into them in front of any of the team.

He would have to explain it, how Hello Kitty featured several different animal characters, and these briefs were ever-so-hard-to-find, and Keroppi had always been his favorite character, and they had just been delivered from the borderline copyright-infringing website he’d ordered them from, with a free cell phone charm included. He would have to explain how when he was too tired for baking, shopping online for random things he could now, living at college, order for private enjoyment had become an excellent procrastination tool. He would be chirped to high heaven, which was why he’d hid in the shower, but now, taking butt-selfies of his new undergarments, he knew it was--

“Bitty?”

Eric made a noise between a screech and a yelp, his phone leaping out of his hands and doing backflips in the air, as he turned to see Derek Nurse, at his locker, picking up a nail clipper he’d forgotten. Eric's phone bounced inside his locker.

The noise had made the defenseman look up, briefly, then down, then do a double take. Eric watched Derek straighten up, his eyes on the cartoon frog face that now snugly wrapped Eric’s butt and crotch area.

“You’re wearing--” Derek said, his deep voice nonplussed, “--children’s--”

“You didn’t see this—I’ll bake you any pie you like--”

“--underwear.”

Eric covered his face, the blood rushing to fill his cheeks. “Derek. Malik. Nurse. If you don’t tell anyone, I promise to let you loogee anywhere you like in this locker room without saying a wor—no, anywhere in Samwell—anywhere on the planet--”

Derek held up a finger as if he was about to make a speech. Then he said, “Frog panties.”

“DEREK!”

“ _Bittle wears frog panties_.”

Eric said, heatedly, “They are for adults. They’re from the internet.”

“Good thing I left mine at home,” Derek quipped, as Eric pit a hand on his forearm indignantly, “Or one of us would have to change.”

“You don’t know my life, Derek Nurse!”

“I know more about it, at least, then I did this morning.”

“I’m getting dressed. I—I would appreciate you at least giving me a week to transfer my credits to a different school before you tell anyone, especially anyone in the Samwell Men’s Hockey group chat, about--

“Frog panties?”

Eric’s entire face and neck were burning as he pulled on his jeans. “Don’t. You—you’re a frog yourself!”

“ _Oooh_ , he did it. Now I’m going to make it a trending hashtag on Twitter.”

Bittle let go of the waistband in alarm, turning worriedly. “Derek! You really shouldn’t even joke like that!”

“Why, you’re afraid of your parents finding out about #frogpanties? Live a little, Bittle.” Derek laughed as he shot Eric one last cool glance and stepped out.

 


End file.
